Solid Drives

If you haven't heard, Linux is taking a leap forward. It's becoming available at many stores as the primary operating system on several computers. Just recently I was shopping online at best buy and saw they have a $400 laptop that comes completely suited with Linux as its ONLY operating system. This is much different from all of us Linux users who use dual booting between Mac/Windows and ubuntu. But this isn't what impressed me the most about this computer, which is designed for the average user not running a million programs at once, but for the every-day programs such as email, word processing, and internet surfing. What caught my attention was the 4GB SSD. This technology is becoming more and more available, as Mac has started integrating it into their products as well. I know what everyone's firsts thoughts are when they scan over the 4GB Hard Drive. That's ridiculously small. I can't even fit all my operating system programs on that amount of space. First lets take a look at what SSDs really are.

An SSD is a different way of storing memory in a computer. Computers run off of what is called binary data. There are 0's and 1's only. In a regular hard drive, the difference between a zero and a one is in the direction of the charge. In a Solid State Drive, it is whether or not there is an electric charge in the cell. Solid state drives were birthed in the nanotechnology revolution that we are currently in. This means that as we can continue creating smaller and smaller pockets to hold the electricity, the more storage space we can make available. This is much more efficient than the old magnetic hard drives, but currently they do not have the same capacity as they do. Slowly though, they are catching up.

So far I have pretty much described reasons as to why this laptop would be very bad. It doesn't have enough space, but it turns out that it has more than others when you look at the size of the operating system. I'm an older Linux user, and have been doing so without installing it on a computer of my own. I have a 2 GB flash drive that I formatted to be bootable. So instead of booting the computer regularly, I set it to boot off of the flash drive, which makes my files completely run the computer, so to speak. If you haven't put it together, I ran the entire operating system and all of my personal files off of 2 GB of memory. And believe it or not, I still had 1GB of memory after a year of use. The operating system itself is very small, and the software for the operating system is all completely FREE.

If you want a change, or even to just learn something new, take a look into this computer and take a chance with it. Once you try linux, you'll never go back to your operating system again.